A Sadistic Relationship to the Creatures of the Sea

After our family Christmas dinner and several days of leftovers, I'm going to offer you "Guide to Swedes #42: Seafood."

The first time I visited Fredrik, he asked me if I wanted caviar or paté for breakfast. Wow, Europeans don't mess around, I thought. It turns out the caviar in question was Kalles Kaviar, a light orange paste in a tube that's made from cod eggs, salt, sugar, and god knows what else. Kids like it. It has such a strong flavor that the latest TV commercials for it show a man standing in a little booth on the sidewalk in various other countries, offering people samples on crackers, and showing them react in disgust to this exotic Swedish tube-food.

In August, Swedes have crayfish parties. There's nothing particularly gross about how crayfish taste. The tail is small and rubberly, like a shrimp, and since they're always cooked the same way it tastes almost exclusively of salt and dill. But you don't just eat the tail; that defeats the purpose of the crayfish party. They are cooked whole and have to be dissected at the table. Think lobster, but miniature. You get your hands wet and slimey with salty dill juice, crayfish eggs, and a greasy blob of fat that they call "crayfish butter," and comments such as "sucking out the brain juice is my favorite" can be heard, uttered by 80-year old women.

Some people opt to have surströmming parties in August instead of crayfish parties. No one understands why.

Surströmming is fermented herring. It smells like biology class on dissection day. And that is not an exageration. Here are some rules about surströmming:

• You are not allowed the pack it in your checked luggage on an airplane, because the can is under extreme pressure and might explode. But wait, they don't care if a bottle of wine breaks in my bag, so why care about the surströmming? Because they don't want you spreading the stank all over everyone else's lugage.
• You are supposed to open the can wrapped in a towel and/or under water, because that way it won't squirt stinky juice all over you.
• It is considered gauche to have a surströmming party indoors. Your house would stink for weeks.

All of the above is honestly, seriously true. As is the fact that people have parties where they eat the stuff. Seriously.

Surströmming isn't the only herring that Swedes have an unholy relationship with. There's pickled herring. And any holiday is an occasion for pickled herring. Pickled herring on Easter. Pickled herring on Midsommar. Pickled herring on Christmas. With onions, or dill, or tomato sauce, or mustard sauce, or apple curry sauce, or any other of a large varity of different flavors that can be purchased at the store in a delusional pact to pretend it doesn't just all taste like strongly fishy raw fish.

I saw a show about food history/trends where they got old Swedish ladies to try sushi, as a way of discussing how certain foods can be considered perfectly normal just a generation or two after they were considered exotic. The ladies weren't so into it. I suppose they prefer their raw fish to be soaked in vinegar and onions and taste like it's still alive.

On Christmas Eve, it's traditional to eat a buffet that contains almost exclusively pork products. The only non-mammal food on the table tends to be a dish called Janssons frestelse (Jansson's temptation). It's like au gratin potatoes, but with a very important twist.

Anchovy fillets and anchovy juice.

So you've got the potatoes, the cream, the butter, all that, but instead of the cheese that you would have in au gratin potatoes, you go "I know! Let's put scaley anchovy fillets in there instead. And then we wouldn't want to waste the juice in the anchovy can, so we'll pour that over."

And now, we come to my favorite. Another dish reserved for the festive Christmas season.

Lutefisk.

It's actually called lutfisk in Swedish (the word lutefisk that we've adopted in English is the Norwegian word). Lut is the Swedish word for lye. You know the stuff that they used as an example of an extremely high pH substance in chemistry class; the stuff that people used to use to clean clothes and very dirty stuff but that we always heard horror stories about some pour unsupervised kid drinking it and thereafter needing 37 surgeries and a lifelong need to be fed through a tube?

No surprise then that, if you soak cod in lye, it develops a Jell-o-like consistency. What is surprising is that someone decided that this was a good thing to produce and eat. It's one of those foods that makes you wonder "how many people died in the quest to discover just how many days of soaking and rinsing in water is required to make lye-soaked whitefish non-caustic?"

Now, I make it sound like I think all of this fishy fish is disgusting. Not at all; I love fish, and with the exception of the surströmming and lutefisk (because I'm not keen on food that requires supressing every instinct in my dry-heaving body), I eat and enjoy all of it.

All I'm saying is, for all my non-Swedish friends who might be curious about my adopted people, Swedes have a macabre knack for doing unspeakable things to seafood.